Seize the Night

that same summer and the following autumn, described the aftermath of these murders, which apparently had been committed by a disturbed boy named John Joseph Randolph. Ultimately, he had been remanded to a juvenile detention center in the northern part of the state, until he achieved the age of eighteen, by which time he would have been psychologically evaluated, if declared criminally insane, he would subsequently be hospitalized for long-term psychiatric care.
    The three pictures of young John showed a towheaded boy, tall for his age, with pale eyes, slim but athletic-looking. In all the shots, which appeared to be family photographs taken prior to the homicides, he had a winning smile.
    That July night, he'd shot his father in the head. Five times.
    Then he hacked his mother to death with an ax.
    The name John Joseph Randolph was unnervingly familiar, though I couldn't think why.
    On one of the clippings, I spotted a subhead that referred to the arresting police officer: Deputy Louis Wing. Lilly's father-in-law. Jimmy's grandfather. Lying now in a coma in a nursing home, after suffering three strokes.
    Louis Wing will be my servant in Hell.
    Evidently, Jimmy had not been abducted because his blood sample, given at preschool, had revealed an immune factor protecting him from the retrovirus. Instead, old-fashioned vengeance was the motivation.
    “Here,” Sasha said. She pointed to another clipping, where the subhead revealed the name of the presiding judge: George Dulcinea. Great grandfather to Wendy. Fifteen years in the grave.
    George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell.
    No doubt, Del Stuart or someone in his family had crossed John Joseph Randolph somewhere, sometime. If we knew the connection, it would expose a motive for vengeance.
    John Joseph Randolph. The strangely familiar name continued to worry me.
    As I followed Sasha and the others along the gallery, I seined my memory but came up with an empty net.
    The next clipping dated back thirty-seven years and dealt with the murder-dismemberment of a sixteen-year-old girl in a San Francisco suburb. Police, according to the subhead, had no leads.
    The newspaper had published the dead girl's high-school photo.
    Across her face, someone had used a felt-tip marker to print four slashing letters, MINE.
    It occurred to me that if he hadn't been diagnosed criminally insane prior to turning eighteen, John Joseph Randolph might have been released from juvenile detention that year with a handshake, an expunged record, pocket money, and a prayer.
    The following thirty-five years were chronicled by thirty-five clippings concerning thirty-five apparently unsolved, savage murders.
    Two-thirds had been committed in California, from San Diego and La Jolla to Sacramento and Yucaipa, the rest were spread over Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.
    The victims—each photo defaced with the word MINE—presented no easily discernible pattern. Men and women. Young and old. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Straight and gay. If all these were the work of the same man, and if that man was John Joseph Randolph, then our Johnny was an equal-opportunity killer.
    From a cursory examination of the clippings, I could see only two details linking these numerous murders. First, the horrendous degree of violence with which they had been committed, whether with blunt or sharp instruments. The headlines used words like BRUTAL, VICIOUS, SAVAGE, and SHOCKING. Second: None of the victims was sexually molested, Johnny's only passions were bashing and slashing.
    But only one event per calendar year. When Johnny indulged in his annual murder, he really let himself go, burnt off all his excess energy, poured out every drop of pent-up bile. Nonetheless, for a lifelong serial killer with such a prodigious career, his three hundred and sixty-four days of self-restraint for every single day of maniacal butchery were surely without precedent in the annals of sociopathic homicide. What had he been doing during those days of restraint?
    Into what had all that violent energy been directed?
    In less than two minutes, as I quickly scanned this montage of mementos from Johnny's scrapbook, my claustrophobia had been pressed out of me by a more fundamental, more visceral terror. The faint but constant electronic hum, the trainlike rumble, and the less frequent but fearsome keening combined to mask any sounds that we made as we approached the killer's lair, but the same cacophony might screen the sounds that Johnny made as